An engine can only produce so much horsepower. If you’ve got a 300 horsepower engine, it’ll produce 300 horsepower. Sure, you can expend a lot of effort, bore those cylinders out and up the horsepower 10%, but you’re still in about the same range. No matter what you do, your engine’s never going to produce as much power as the guy who starts with a 500 hp Chevy big block.
But, that doesn’t mean your 300 hp engine can’t kick the shit out of that 500 hp Chevy. How?
A lot of different ways.
That Chevy big block, by itself, can’t move at all. You’ve got to hook it up to a clutch, then a transmission, then a crank shaft, then a differential, then some axles, and then, finally, if you throw some tires on there, you can start to go somewhere. That Chevy big block might produce 500 hp at the crank, but, due to inefficiencies along that chain, may only produce 300 hp at the wheels. And, even with all that power, if you attach that thing to bicycle wheels, you’ll never move at all: they’d just spin and spin until you melted them down into nothing. On the other hand, if your 300 horsepower engine is hooked up to a perfectly efficient drive train, you may barely lose any horsepower at all.
That big block might also be made out of cast iron. Cast iron is heavy, and weight is the enemy in racing. Turns out, it’s not so much about raw horsepower, but about horsepower per pound. A motorcycle with a 100 hp engine can smoke even track cars with five times the horsepower.
You can focus on the engine. You can bore out those cylinders, trying to eke out as much raw horsepower as you can.
Or, you can focus on the rest of the system. You can make the drive train as efficient as possible. You can throw out the back seats, and the air conditioner, and the paneling to get rid of as much dead weight as you can. You can save up for the appropriate size tires so you get as much traction as possible without picking up excess drag. You can go out and study every inch of the track until you master it.
If you do the latter, you can flog that 300 hp engine so it performs to its absolute maximum capability and you’ll beat the guy with the 500 hp engine who never figured out how to get his power to the ground, every single time.
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